A great improvement over an inexplicably beloved brand franchise:
Category Archives: media
Home naming is killing the, oh, nevermind…
IPR ideology trickles down:
A former South Dakota lawmaker convicted of [a bunch of awful stuff] has sent news organizations what he claims is a copyright notice that seeks to prevent the use of his name without his consent. A letter and an accompanying document labeled "Common Law Copyright Notice" said former state Rep. Ted Alvin Klaudt is reserving a common-law copyright of a trade name or trademark for his name. It said no one can use his name without his consent, and anyone who does would owe him $500,000.
Plan B: the national-security argument.
An iPhone app you can wrap your fish in
under media
The NYTeims tries out newspaper as website iPhone app as newspaper:
The founder is no doubt spinning sliding in his grave.
“In an insane world, the sane man must appear to be insane”
Also sprach Hauptmann Kirk.
LAT:
With the birth of his son 15 years ago, dedicated linguist d’Armond Speers embarked on the ultimate experiment: He spoke to him only in Klingon — the language of the alien race of “Star Trek” fame — for the first three years of his life.
“I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” Speers said. “He was definitely starting to learn it.”
So when Ultralingua, a dictionary, translation and grammar software company in Dinkytown, honored requests from customers to create applications for a Klingon dictionary, they turned to Speers, a self-employed software consultant.
“It was right square in my sweet spot,” said Speers, who graduated from Georgetown University in 2002 with a doctorate in computational linguistics.
If he'd used Europanto, his son would still speak it fluently.
Queen, bishops, pawns
under economics, government, media
The Guardian (formerly known as Teh Grauniad but since displaced by the NY Teims) does a number on HM:
QOTD2
To underline our understanding of what DNS is, we must differentiate it from what it is not. The Internet economy rewards unlimited creativity in the monetization of human action, and fairly often this takes the form of some kind of intermediation. For DNS, monetized intermediation means lying. The innovators who bring us such monetized intermediation do not call what they sell "lies," but in this case it walks like a duck and quacks like one, too.
Monetized intermediation means lying.
QOTD
under digital, government, international, language, law, media, network
Your avatar’s arms are never going to be long enough to box with a game god whose software controls arm length.
Or, as we used to put it: he who would snack with the Devil must needs use a long spork...
Flickr Pro, Flickr Con
under crime, digital, government, law, media, military, neighborhood, security, trend, urban
Bernie Kerik’s Flickr photostream includes gems like Officer Kerik in ’93...
...“plainclothes” (modulo the assault rifle) Kerik escorting Susan Rosenberg (ca. ’83?; SR playing ping pong here)...
...authentic arrest scenes...
...and, indeed, pretty much his entire rise and fall. Except for his mugshot:
The kommissar disappears:
(Left: Flickr, plemeljr, 8 Feb ’05 [detail]; right: m3t00, 11 Oct ’09.)
Futile style
(It’s tempting to ask why this lasts as long as it does, but to many that question would suggest that this is way too long; it may be so, but a better question is whyit lasts precisely as long as it does? Not a deep question — but this is a fine example of a new sort of genre that most geezers Do Not Get.)
(dvc)
“Counterintuitiveness”
under economics, environment, language, media, trend
At first glance, though, what it looks like is that Levitt and Dubner have fallen into the trap of counterintuitiveness. For a long time, there’s been an accepted way for commentators on politics and to some extent economics to distinguish themselves: by shocking the bourgeoisie, in ways that of course aren’t really dangerous. [...] Clever snark like this can get you a long way in career terms — but the trick is knowing when to stop. It’s one thing to do this on relatively inconsequential media or cultural issues. But if you’re going to get into issues that are both important and the subject of serious study, like the fate of the planet, you’d better be very careful not to stray over the line between being counterintuitive and being just plain, unforgivably wrong. It looks as if Superfreakonomics has gone way over that line.
Economics connected to politics? Imagine that!
There goes everybody
BBC reports:
The Polish authorities in charge of Auschwitz have launched an official site for the former Nazi death camp on the social networking website Facebook.
RT @auschwitz: " "
(ts)
Invisible hand spotted
It showed the hand of whoever fed pages into the scanner — a hand with a latex sheath on its index finger, like a condom. The person’s nails were nothing to brag about. The condom and the nails, combined with the sudden, unexpected appearance, made the picture seem obscene and unhealthy. I thought with horror of the guy who found a finger in his bowl of fast-food chili.
Patton asks: “So it is likely that the company will also ignore this question: If the process of creating Google Books is open and its motives good, why is there so much secrecy about the nuts and bolts?”
(rp)
Web 2.0 1.0
An edifying history:
The number of Geocities pages that archive.org actually archived in any given year tells a bare-bones story:
1996: 7
1997: 13
1998: 39
1999: 70
2000: 136
2001: 22366
2002: 0
A JPEG of the archive.org Geocities page puts it in perspective — the original image at 12 inches wide is over 12 feet long:
Detail:
A walk down memory-constraints lane: banner ads, duly archived.
Major social networking sites will probably prove to be more durable than Geocities (which Yahoo bought for US$3.65 billion), but that’s a pretty low bar.
Eat the Red Catfood
Prehistory of The Matrix:
Attn net.artists looking for a project: super-8 bullet-time.
( ffffound | jk )
Tweet tweet: a little birdie told me…
The Guardian reports on an NYC anarcho arrested for twittering whereabouts of police at Pittsburgh G20:
Elliot Madison, 41, from Queens, had his home raided and was put on $30,000 (£19,000) bail after he and Michael Wallschlaeger, 46, were tracked to the Carefree Inn motel in Pittsburgh during the summit on 24 and 25 September. The pair were found sitting in front of a bank of laptops and emergency frequency radio scanners. They were wearing headphones and microphones and had many maps and contact numbers in the room. Official police documents allege the two men used Twitter messages to contact protesters at the summit "and to inform the protesters and groups of the movements and actions of law enforcement".
OTOH...
During the summit, the police openly monitored Twitter to listen in to the protesters' communications.
"Openly."
(rp)
Move over Grauniad, here comes the Teims
Calling Sebastianaro Timpanaro! NYT misspells “euphemisms” in Safire obit:
(The context suggests it was a joke rather than a typo? They corrected it.)
Innocent mistake or Freudian mise-en-abyme in which NYT copy editors exact posthumous revenge on the in-house father of language?